Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing

by Patrick F. McManus

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  I handed her a sheet of paper.

  She stared at it. “What’s this? ‘Cleaners, haircut, return books to library …’”

  “Sorry. Wrong paper.”

  I dug another sheet from my pocket and handed it to her.

  Her face contorted in wild ecstacy as she scanned the paper. “Yes! This is it! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  I almost expected the earth to move. It didn’t. Then, suddenly, her lovely hazel eyes became icy slits of suspicion.

  “Are you sure this is authentic?” she demanded, thrusting the paper under my nose.

  “I’m sure. It’s Zumbo’s secret recipe. I took notes while he was preparing it in a Wyoming hunting camp.”

  “Does he know you have it?”

  “No. And he’d better not find out, either.”

  She clutched the paper to her ample bosom. “Oh, this is so wonderful! Jim Zumbo’s own secret recipe for chicken-fried elk steak!”

  She took me by the arm and led me to the table. “This little offering buys you membership in the Chicken-Fried Club.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I figured it would.”

  As I pulled out a chair and joined a couple of other diners, the lady bent over and whispered huskily in my ear. “But where can I find an elk?”

  “That’s your problem, Evening Pale Blue Dun,” I said, and it wasn’t all that easy to say, either. Even if I’d known where to find an elk, I certainly wouldn’t have told her.

  The occupants at the table introduced themselves: Wooly Worm and Hare’s Ear, their code names, I assumed.

  “March Brown,” I said, shaking hands.

  They went back to their plump, juicy, golden chicken-fried steaks. “The waiter will bring yours in a minute,” Hare’s Ear said. “There’s no limit, either. Eat all you want.”

  “The hash browns look delicious,” I said. “They have that nice sparkling sheen of hot grease, so essential to true hash browns.”

  “I see you’re a true connoisseur of fat,” Wooly Worm said. “By the way, old man, sorry for the cold reception you got when you first came in. We thought for a moment you might be with the Fat Police. You can’t be too careful these days.”

  “I know,” I said. “They’re everywhere.”

  Just then a waiter came around with a huge serving tray stacked high with steaming chicken-fried steaks. I took only a couple, in order to leave room for a substantial load of mashed potatoes and gravy. The coffee was dark and rich, fairly sizzling with caffeine. I dribbled thick cream into it.

  “I can’t begin to tell you how delighted I was when Evening Pale Blue Dun invited me to join the Chicken-Fried Club,” I said.

  “You were most fortunate,” Wooly Worm said. “We’d just had a sudden opening among the membership.” He and Hare’s Ear bowed their heads.

  “Yes, poor Black Gnat,” Wooly Worm said. “He was sitting right there in your chair, matter of fact. Suddenly just flopped over, his face in his mashed potatoes.”

  “Good heavens,” I said. “Sounds like a cardi—”

  My companions spewed food all over the table. Almost ruined my appetite.

  “Never speak that word in this room!” Wooly Worm hissed. “You’d be ejected immediately! And rather forcefully, you can be quite sure!”

  “Sorry,” I said, glancing about. “I only meant to say ‘cardigan,’ the sweater, you know. Cardigans can be quite deadly.”

  Wooly Worm and Hare’s Ear regained their composure.

  “Yes, quite right, old man,” Wooly Worm said. “Cardigans must be avoided.”

  As I was leaving, Evening Pale Blue Dun came up and took me by the arm once again.

  “That was a very nice gift,” she said. “I hoped you enjoyed yourself.”

  “It was terrific,” I said. “By the way, since you’re the one who runs this club, I was wondering if by any chance you’re into fly-fishing?”

  “Hardly,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “Be back next week?”

  “Sure. After all, this is the last place in the country where you can get chicken-fried steak.”

  She turned those warm, inviting eyes on me. “Anything special I can do for you next time, big boy?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “Yeah, there is,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Biscuits and gravy.”

  She smiled and winked.

  I opened the door, paused for just a second, then looked back at that shimmering vision that was Evening Pale Blue Dun.

  “Sausage gravy.”

  Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing

  The Old Man was sitting across from me at the kitchen table in his cabin, polluting the air to lethal levels with a large illegal cigar someone had smuggled in to him and that his doctor had ordered him to stop smoking anyway.

  “I know Doc ordered you to give up those cigars,” I said. “Your smoking them is bad for my health.”

  “That’s because you’re a pantywaist,” he said. “This is a fine cigar, and if you had any taste at all, you’d appreciate its lovely aroma. Hemingway always brought me a couple boxes from Cuba when he came up to hunt with me in Idaho. Now, there was a man! They don’t make men like Hem anymore, yourself being a case in point.”

  “I’ve heard all your Hemingway stories and don’t believe a one of them,” I said. “But they’ve improved over the years.”

  “Practice makes perfect,” he said. “I ever tell you the time I outshot Hem on a grouse hunt? He wouldn’t speak to me for two days afterwards, he was so mad. So then I let him beat me in arm wrestling, and then he was okay. I loved grouse hunting best of all. Almost best of all. Say, I got an idea. Let’s go grouse hunting.”

  “You’re too old and almost blind,” I said, kindly. “You can’t see more than ten feet ahead of your nose. How are you going to shoot grouse?”

  “You leave that to me,” he said. “Now don’t just stand there with your mouth hangin’ open. Get me down one of my shotguns. The French twelve-gauge side-by-side will do.”

  “You gave that gun away years ago,” I said.

  “Well, that was a durn fool thing for me to do. Who’d I give it to?”

  “Me.”

  “You! I would never give you a shotgun. You must have stole it.”

  “Nope, you gave it to me. It’s mine now, and I’m keeping it. Anyway, it’s much too fine a shotgun for a dirty old man like yourself. It’s a gentleman hunter’s gun. It’s surprising any decent gun dealer would sell a fine instrument like that to an unsavory character such as yourself.”

  “Interesting you should say that,” he said. “I tried to be a gentleman hunter once, but it didn’t take. Belonged to one of them elegant shooting clubs. Had to dress up like we was going to an afternoon tea rather than on a hunt. They had all these pheasants penned up like a bunch of chickens, and whenever we got ready for a hunt, one of the hired hands let a hundred or so of them loose and we’d go out and shoot them. The pheasants was tame, of course, so we’d practically have to kick them up in the air in order to get them to fly. So one day I says to the president of the club, I says, ‘Howard, this is a big nuisance, hunting pheasants this way. Why don’t we just shoot them in the pens and be done with it? Save both the pheasants and us a lot of bother.’ Well, that made Howard and some of the other gentlemen mad, and they booted me out of the club. So I quit the club right then and there. Figured it would teach them a good lesson.”

  “Served them right,” I said.

  “I thought so. Now, stop standin’ around jawing at me.

  If we’re gonna go grouse hunting, we got to get to it. Fetch me the little Brit twenty-gauge.”

  I went to find the 20-gauge. It was as fine a gun as I’d ever seen. The Old Man had been rich once, his guns now the only evidence of that former wealth. I figured he’d become rich by accident or inheritance, because as far as I knew he’d n
ever worked. He was not the sort of man who would waste much effort on becoming rich. It had been a long time since he’d outlived his wealth, along with all his friends and enemies. “Mostly I did it to spite my enemies,” he’d say, “but it got my friends, too.”

  He was very old now, ninety at least, maybe even a hundred; it was hard to tell, because he lied about everything, particularly his age. He was one of those peculiar old men who somehow managed to spend their entire lives enjoying themselves. He’d done just about everything there is to do, and what he hadn’t done, he simply lied and claimed to have done that, too. He was a very irritating old man, and I couldn’t understand why I put up with him. I handed him the gun.

  “Good,” the Old Man said. “I was worried that you might have stole this one, too.”

  “Just an oversight,” I said. “I’ll come back and get it some night when you’re asleep.”

  “Ha!” he said. “That will take some doing. I ain’t slept in twenty years. Now, here’s my idea. We’ll go out to that good grouse woods behind Jake Gregory’s farm, and you can flush some birds toward me, and I’ll snap shoot them as they pass through my field of vision.”

  “Can’t,” I said. “Jake Gregory’s woods is now a golf course.”

  “A golf course! They turned a good grouse woods into a golf course? I hate golfs! Well, we can go out there anyway, and you can flush some golfs toward me. How about that?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I know. We can go out to the mountain where Rance Crabtree used to live and—”

  “A shopping mall.”

  “A shopping mall! Good gosh a-mighty, what’s a shopping mall doing way out in the country?”

  “It’s not way out in the country anymore. It’s in town.”

  “They moved the mountain into town?”

  “No. They moved the town out to the mountain. They’ve got condos all over the mountain.”

  “Condos? They good to eat?”

  “Kind of tough and not much flavor. Taste a lot like golfs.”

  “Hunh. I don’t like shootin’ stuff ain’t fit to eat. Unless, of course, it gets to be a nuisance. Let that be a lesson to you. Ain’t there any good grouse woods about no more?”

  “I know a couple spots. But I like to keep them a secret. I show them to you, you’ll be sneaking out there and shooting all my grouse.”

  “You bet. Now stop your yapping at me and let’s go.”

  “Oh all right,” I said. “While you’re walking out to the car I’m going to have only another cup of coffee or two and maybe read the newspaper. So you’d better get started.”

  “I’ve been started for the past five minutes. Shows how observant you are!”

  I drove the Old Man over to my house and managed to kill a little time there while my wife. Bun, babied him and fed him sponge cake with huckleberry sauce and whipped cream. She doesn’t permit me to have whipped cream, a good indication of how much she prefers the Old Man over me.

  I got my own gun and a vest full of shells, and considered whether to take the dog’s shock collar. The collar works wonders for instilling obedience, but I wasn’t sure how it would affect his pacemaker.

  I finally extracted the Old Man from the fawning attention of Bun and inserted him back into the car.

  “That’s a fine woman,” he said, licking remnants of whipped cream from his mustache. “She married?”

  “You know she is,” I said. “To me.”

  “You! What a waste!”

  I drove out to one of my secret grouse woods and put the Old Man on a stand well out of range of my car. He sat down on a stump with the gun across his lap and a dead cigar clamped between his teeth.

  “This is a good grouse woods,” he said. “It’s a little blurry but it smells right. You’re too ornery to find me a nice clear grouse woods, but at least you found one that smells right. It sounds okay, too.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’m going to circle around through the woods and see if I can flush some grouse toward you. Don’t shoot anybody.”

  “I’m glad you mentioned that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known. If a golf comes by, I might try for it, though. How much lead on a golf?”

  “A couple of feet if it’s driving a cart flat out. If it’s walking or running, you can pretty much hold right on. But there’s a big fine if you shoot one.”

  I strolled off through the woods, enjoying it, absorbing it, feeling the press of birch leaves under my boots, listening to the rustle of small wild lives dart unseen for cover, smelling all the pungent smells of a grouse woods in late fall. I shot my first grouse in this same woods when I was about twelve, an amazing shot that would have been even more amazing if the grouse had been flying, instead of sitting on a limb. I was hunting all alone, the hand-me-down 12-gauge shotgun big as a howitzer, and both barrels had gone off simultaneously and knocked me flat on my back, skinned up my trigger finger, and bloodied my nose. I thought the gun had exploded, and was glad still to be alive, but it had shot true and killed the grouse stone dead. My mother was enormously pleased with the grouse, marveling that her son had brought home wild game, and she cooked it in a gravy to pour over rice, and that one grouse could have fed twenty people, with some left over for the dog. I forgot to mention to anyone that the grouse had been sitting on a limb, but a kid can’t be expected to remember everything.

  I walked all the way through the woods and came out near a road on the other side, and by then I had three grouse, enough for my mother to have fed an army. All three shots were amazing, all wing shots, too, with the grouse burrrring off through the trees, but none so amazing as the shot that took that first grouse fifty years ago. Did I say fifty? Surely I meant twenty. Yes, it couldn’t possibly have been more than twenty years ago.

  “How’d you do?” the Old Man asked me. “I heard a dozen shots. Even you must have got something with a dozen shots.”

  “Three grouse,” I said. “How about you?”

  “I did fine,” he said. “None for none. It was a good hunt. This is a great grouse woods. By the way, what does that sign say over there? I been thinking about walking over so I could read it, but then I figured I might not make it back before dark.”

  “That sign. Oh, it just says, ‘Private Property. No Hunting.’”

  “Is that all?” the Old Man said. “I thought it might be something important.”

  On the way back to town, the Old Man mentioned that he’d got hungry from all his exertion. “Let’s stop and get a bite at Gert’s Gas ’N’ Grub.”

  “You want to eat at Gert’s Gas ’N’ Grub?” I said. “Why, you must be half starved, and crazy besides!”

  Gert herself came out to visit with us, and all the waitresses gathered around and made a big fuss over the Old Man, and he ate it all up, along with a chicken-fried steak and hash browns with gravy poured over them. He joked with the waitress and tried to pinch Gert on the behind, but she was too quick for him, as was almost everyone. Then a couple of the local boys joined in the festivities, and after a while one of them asked what we’d been up to.

  “Grouse hunting,” the Old Man said.

  “Get any?” Red Barnes asked.

  “I only got three,” the Old Man said. “The boy here, he didn’t get none. Did a lot of shooting, though, so he had some fun. It was a good hunt.”

  “Well, I guess your eyes are still plenty sharp then,” Gert said.

  “Yep,” the Old Man said. “Mighty sharp for a man my age—thirty-nine and some. Well, we best be going. Pay the bill, boy, and leave the girls a big tip.”

  We didn’t get back to the Old Man’s cabin until after dark, and he was pretty well tuckered out, although still smiling over all the attention heaped on him by the girls at Gert’s. “I guess I still got it,” he said.

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “It’s just that you’ve got so old the women know you’re harmless. First you get harmless, then you get lovable. That’s the way it works with women.”

  “You�
�re just jealous,” he said.

  I helped him to his cabin and was about to close the door behind him when I suddenly remembered. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You left your gun in the car. I’ll go get it.”

  “Naw,” he said. “Keep it. Save us both the trouble of you stealing it from me later. That was a fine grouse woods. Mighty fine. I’d thank you for taking me there, but it’d just give you a big head.”

  I drove on home, happy in a way about the gift of the gun, but also not so happy. When you get right down to it, a gun is only a gun. I was glad it had been a good hunt, though, and I was even more glad that I had lied about the sign next to the grouse woods. What it actually said was, “Future Site of the New Grouse Haven Golf Course and Condos!”

  Dream Fish

  The great fish came to me in a dream.

  I was ten years old and fishing was practically my whole life, all else mostly filler. At the moment, I was trapped, perhaps terminally, in fourth grade. The only thing that could save my sanity was Opening Day of Trout Season, and it lay far off in the future, somewhere beyond eternity. And then came the dream. It went like this:

  It is spring, Opening Day of Trout Season, and I’m down on the creek in the eerie light just before dawn. I see the fishing hole as clearly as if I’m actually there, it’s all so real. The weather has been cold, must have been cold, because the melt-off in the mountains hasn’t come yet. Otherwise, the creek would be running high on Opening Day of Trout Season—up near the top of the banks, the water the color of a chocolate shake, and about as thick. But in the dream, the creek flows low and clear.

  I am familiar with this particular hole, have fished it often in real time. The creek divides around a little willow-clad island at this spot, a narrow stream going down one side of the island and the main stream down the other. The main stream ripples across a gravel bed, then deepens into the hole, a dark placid pool beneath an overhanging stump at the end of the island.

  A log crosses the small stream, a convenience supplied by the dream to keep me from getting my feet wet in the icy water as I cross over to the island. The dense willows on the island prevent me from approaching closer to the hole, just as it does in ordinary life, but a tiny protruding gravel beach provides me a place to stand for a straight shot at the hole, a drift of about fifty feet. I prefer fishing a much shorter line, and although I don’t think so at the time, it seems to me now that the dream, which had been rather accommodating so far, would have provided me with a little closer access.